What are memories when there is no one left to share them ? What are the traces of a family when there is no-one to identify the people in the photograph or recognize a favourite book or chair ? In The Dead Ones , theatre director, writer and Feast Festival co-founder, Margie Fischer’s deftly weighted, beautifully detailed monologue about clearing and selling the family home in Sydney’s East Lindfield, we are reminded that the ties that bind inevitably transmute from the physical to the ethereal.

Director Catherine Fitzgerald shrewdly describes the work as “part obituary, part theatre, part slideshow, part lecture, part wake, part homage to William Yang.” It is all of these, and, like Yang’s famous solo work Sadness, it covers painful territory without becoming mired or self absorbed. Fischer’s signature, right back to the early days of her theatre company Vitalstatistix, has always been sharp and zany – perceptive, full of feeling, but finding a lightness to express the darkness, stealing a wry smile from adversity.

And , in the Fischer family story, there is plenty of adversity to recall. Barely escaping with their lives from Nazi occupied Austria in 1938, her Jewish parents Alois and Marianne, fled first to Shanghai for ten years before arriving in Sydney in 1949. The paternal grandparents also escaped, but the rest of the extended family died in concentration camps. This is a vigorous story of resourceful “refos” as Alois himself called them, setting up the thriving furniture business, Fischer’s Modern Homes Pty Ltd. Fischer describes growing up speaking Yiddish at home while she and her brother Peter (who died tragically of spinal cancer at age 22) explored the lifestyle of post-war Australian teenagers.

Using photographs, documents and evocative music (including The Sound of Music’s Eidelweis) Fischer describes, with a kind of circling narrative, the lives of the family and their eventual deaths. It is a diary of days spent in the house after her mother, the last inhabitant, dies in 2003. Photographs, books, lovingly made items of furniture, a large collection of square-fronted nightdresses, men’s ties, a terminally ill young man’s model ship – what is to be done with these ? It’s to the hard rubbish, the incinerator, the op-shops and deceased estate removalists – but each item is considered one last time and given its place in a now evaporating history.

Deceptive in its apparent simplicity. The Dead Ones covers a lot of ground with the repetitions of text and image gathering complexity and intensity as Fischer memorably chronicles one family – but reminds us of all families.

Murray Bramwell

BRIEF

What are memories when there is no one left to share them ? What are the traces of a family when there is no-one to identify the people in the photograph or recognize a favourite book or chair ? In The Dead Ones , theatre director, writer and Feast Festival co-founder, Margie Fischer’s deftly weighted, beautifully detailed monologue about clearing and selling the family home in Sydney’s East Lindfield, we are reminded that the ties that bind inevitably transmute from the physical to the ethereal.

Deceptive in its apparent simplicity. The Dead Ones covers a lot of ground with the repetitions of text and image gathering complexity and intensity as Fischer memorably chronicles one family – but reminds us of all families.

Murray Bramwell

“Daughter picks through the many pieces left by her lost family” The Australian, November 22, 2011, p.14.